sábado, diciembre 06, 2014

China's authoritarian government is gaining a foothold on American
campuses by funding dozens of institutes that project a rose-tinted view
of the Asian nation that compromises the academic integrity of U.S.
universities, a congressional hearing was told Thursday.

Scholars of China testified that these state-funded Confucius
Institutes teach nonpolitical subjects like Chinese language and culture
but suppress discussion on sensitive topics like Tibet and the 1989
Tiananmen crackdown on democracy protesters.

The hearing was chaired by House Republican Rep. Chris Smith, an arch
critic of Beijing, who questioned whether American education was "for
sale."

Students from China now make up 31 percent of all international
students in the United States. Last year, Chinese students in U.S.
colleges and universities contributed $8 billion to the U.S. economy,
according to the Commerce Department.

U.S. colleges such as New York University are also opening campuses
in China, hoping to tap into the country's enormous, growing pool of
students.

The Chinese Embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Perry Link, a China expert and chancellorial chair at the University
of California at Riverside, said independent scholar-to-scholar
exchanges with China should be encouraged.

But he said the Communist Party of China opposes the exchanges and
prefers to negotiate campus-to-campus cooperation. He said inexperienced
U.S. academic administrators, eager for funding, reach protocols with
party officials that allow authorities in Beijing to choose teachers and
set curricula that provide a rosy "cameo" of China.

Thomas Cushman, a professor in social sciences at Wellesley College,
said the Chinese government's effort to forge ties with U.S institutions
is part of a more general "soft power" strategy toward the West.

There are now about 90 Confucius Institutes in the U.S., part of an expanding network of more than 400 worldwide.

There has been some push back from scholars and colleges in the U.S.
In June, the American Association of University Professors called on
universities to cancel their current agreements with Confucius
Institutes, and this fall the University of Chicago and Penn State ended
their relationships with the institute.

The Chinese state-funded outreach comes amid growing restrictions on
scholars at home as President Xi Jinping's government has tightened
controls over a wide range of society since he took power early last
year.

"For decades, the primary strategy of the CPC in censoring its own
people has been to induce self-censorship," Link said, referring to the
Communist Party of China. "Now the CPC, stronger and wealthier than
before, is looking to project these battle-tested methods onto the world
stage."

Cushman said U.S. scholars of China are careful what they say in
public so they can keep visiting. He said that leads to a "beautified"
version of China that avoids the realities of repression.

Link said he's been blacklisted since the mid-1990s and gets two or
three inquiries per month from younger scholars wanting to know what
they should avoid saying in order not to be barred.

Cushman also contended that professors on U.S. campuses may avoid
discussing sensitive tops about China in their classes out of fear of
negative evaluations by the growing number of Chinese students.

sábado, octubre 04, 2014

Hong Kong's
pro-democracy demonstrators protesting China’s attempts to quash their
rights to self government appear to be only the latest pro-Western group
forsaken by the Obama administration. Meanwhile, its high volume criticism of Israel continues unabated.

First,
Hong Kong. Protests in that former British colony have grown massively
since they started last Friday. The demonstrators-- and, if opinion polls are correct, also the overwhelming majority of Hong Kong People-- oppose the communist government in Beijing’s refusal to stand by provisions of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration
that spelled out the conditions under which Hong Kong would be governed
after its return to China from Britain. Hong Kong’s constitution, or
Basic Law negotiated as part of the of Joint Declaration, guarantees
Hong Kong’s right to govern itself on all non-defense or foreign affairs
matters through 2047.

Protestors claim that China reneged on that agreement
in June when it announced that Beijing would decide which candidates
would be permitted to run in the 2017 elections to pick the self
governing city’s next Chief Executive thereby insuring it would have
full control over all the candidates that seek that office.

As up to a
quarter million protestors peaceably took to Hong Kong streets demanding
freedom last weekend, neither President Obama nor any other senior
administration official said anything at all. It wasn’t until Tuesday
that the US consulate in Hong Kong got around to issuing its first statement and it sided not with the protestors or their freedom cause:

We do not
take sides in the discussion of Hong Kong's political development, nor
do we support any particular individuals or groups involved in it... We
encourage all sides to refrain from actions that would further escalate
tensions, to exercise restraint and to express views on (Hong Kong's)
political development in a peaceful manner.

Meanwhile,
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was again forced to downplay
harsh criticism against the Jewish state leveled by President Obama and
other members of the administration during their White House visit
Wednesday. Media reports claim
that Obama harshly condemned the recent issuance of building permits
for 2,610 apartment units inside the Israeli capital city, without
seeming to understand that those decisions are made at the local, not
the national level.

Netanyahu pushed back hard against the President’s condemnation. He told Spanish language Univisión TV
that “Jews buy apartments in Arab neighborhoods. Arabs buy apartments
in Jewish neighborhoods. I wouldn’t dream of interfering with that, and
couldn’t even if I wanted to." "It is a municipal issue,” he said.

Pointing
out President Obama’s hypocrisy of siding with those who seeking to
prevent Jews from certain neighborhoods in Israel’s capital city,
Netanyahu pointed out “there would be an uproar” if neighborhoods in the
US, Mexico, or anywhere but Israel tried barring Jews from moving in.
In comments that also appeared aimed at the Obama Administration,
Netanyahu seemed to chide the White House and State Department for
thinking they were empowered to micromanage the Jewish state down its
most granular bureaucratic level: “It would be worth at least learning
the correct information before jumping to take a position like that.”

Both the White House and State Department issued harsh condemnations
of the new Jewish housing units, going to so far as to threaten the
Jewish state with abandonment if it continued allowing Jews to move into
neighborhoods that are predominantly Arab.

Former
Israeli Deputy Prime Minister and Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky
writes and speaks regularly about how vital it is for freedom movements
to know their struggles are neither desperate nor lonely. That they
fight for values espoused by and embodied in the United States of
America. When that support is not forthcoming, as in so many recent
cases where President Obama has refused to offer even strong verbal
support for freedom demonstrators in Iran and Venezuela, the effect can
be devastating. Telling this author of the moment he heard of President Reagan’s denunciation of the Soviet Union
as the ‘evil empire’ destined to fail while himself suffering a
tortuous prison sentence in the Soviet Gulag abuses, Sharansky said: “It
was one of the most important, freedom-affirming declarations, and we
all instantly knew it. For us, that was the moment that really marked
the end for them, and the beginning for us. The lie had been exposed and
could never, ever be untold."

lunes, junio 09, 2014

In a burgeoning scandal that has been reported by the Sacramento Bee
regarding the repair of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, a new
fact has come to light: the Chinese company hired to fix the bridge,
Shanghai Zhenhua Port Machinery Co. Ltd., (ZPMC), had never built a bridge.

The Chinese company was, in fact, a manufacturer of giant cranes for container ports.

The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) hired ZPMC in
2006 because its bid was $250 million less than the competing bidder.

Caltrans feared that the bridge might collapse from an earthquake,
and so it chose a company known for its speed. Caltrans asked Jim
Merrill, a senior materials contractor, to evaluate ZPMC’s capability,
and Merrill gave ZPMC a “contingent pass,” calling the company “high
risk.” He pointed out that ZPMC lacked the requisite number of qualified
welders or inspectors and often welded in the rain, which could cause
defects.

Caltrans hired ZPMC anyway, even stating later in a news release that
the repairs showed “zero defects.” Brian Maroney, chief engineer for
the bridge, recently defended the hiring of ZPMC, saying the audit’s “contingent pass” made ZPMC more aware that it had to be careful.

Caltrans even eased U.S. standards because ZPMC was not getting the
job done quickly enough, overriding bridge-welding codes and normal
requirements for new bridge construction. Caltrans said some of the
cracks in the welds left by ZPMC were unimportant "and left them in
place to hurry construction along, Caltrans documents show," according
to the Sacramento Bee.

Maroney claimed ZPMC’s automated welding process had results that
were first-rate, even though Caltrans documents reveal hundreds of
millions of dollars were shelled out to fix problems ZPMC left behind.
Doug Coe, a high-level Caltrans engineer, told
a California Senate committee hearing in January that if ZPMC couldn’t
handle the job, “it should have been taken away from them and built
someplace else… there’s no excuse for building something defective like
that because we are in a race for time.”

The Sacramento Bee has been reporting for years about the
problems with the bridge, including weak foundation concrete, broken
anchor rods, and rust on the suspension span’s main cable. The state
Senate Transportation and Housing Committee and the California Highway
Patrol are investigating the problems with the welds on the bridge, but
Caltrans officials are rigidly defending their actions before the
Senate. Caltrans Director Malcolm Dougherty said, “It has been a winding road to get here, but we are here. We have achieved seismic safety for the bridge.”

Committee chair Sen. Mark DeSaulnier (D-Concord) harshly disagreed, saying Caltrans had made “a deliberate and willful... attempt to obfuscate.” Coe admitted,
“If you have to go up on the decks and start taking lane closures and
scrape off all the asphalt and do deck repairs for months and months and
months, that certainly could affect public welfare,” but added that
professional engineers must report such things, which Coe and his
colleagues did. He concluded by pointing out that after the report is
made, Caltrans is free to accept cracks and defects if the structure is
still "fit for purpose.

sábado, mayo 10, 2014

Chinese experts are studying and considering plans to build a
high-speed rail line that stretches from China to the United States.

If constructed, the project, titled the “China-Russia-Canada-America” line, would stretch out to cover over 8,000 miles of land.

China’s Beijing Times newspaper reported
the line would start in China, continue into Siberia, then pass through
an extensive, 125-mile tunnel underneath the Pacific Ocean, then run
through Alaska and Canada to finally reach destinations within the
continental United States. The total expected trip time is two days (36
hours) with the train traveling at an average speed of 220 miles per
hour.

Some skeptics have doubted the plausibility of the high-speed rail
plan. If constructed, the Bering strait tunnel would have to be by far
the longest underwater tunnel on earth.

Others had concerns revolving around the financial aspect of the
project. "China's railway sector is still being haunted by deep debts.
Therefore, even with the government's support, it must persuade banks to
lend a colossal amount of money," said an expert at Beijing Jiaotong
University.

The report does not mention whether Canada or the United States were consulted in developing plans for the project.

The China-United States rail line is one of four proposed plans to expand China’s high-speed rail coverage.

The Eurasia Line would cover London, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Kiev,
Moscow, Kazakhstan, Khabarovsk(Russia), and would end in Manzhouli
(China).

The proposed Central Line would have stops in Urumqi (China),
Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Turkey, Germany, and “other
countries.”

The Pan-Asian Line would canvas Kunming (China), Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. A Chinese official said the Pan-Asian line’s construction will start next month.

China has completed roughly 6,200 miles (10,000 km) of its own high-speed rail network, with plans to expand it to roughly 11,000 miles (19,000 km) by 2015.

lunes, marzo 17, 2014

Two
of the biggest Internet companies in the world are going public in the
United States, but most Americans have never heard of Chinese
powerhouses Weibo Corp. and Alibaba.

Despite
both companies' lack of recognition in the U.S., they are poised to
make massive stock-market debuts in New York — and make a play to become
household names in America, too.

Sina Weibo

Weibo kicked off the buzz on Friday, when the company filed paperwork to raise $500 million in an initial public offering.

The
company owns Sina Weibo, China's largest microblogging site. Sina Weibo
is similar to Twitter, with short posts from brands, celebrities and
regular folks.

The site has
managed to grow rapidly — the service had more than 129 million active
users as of December, up 77 percent in just two years — despite a
tightly controlled media environment in China. Hundreds of Weibo users
have reportedly been arrested in China over posts that angered the
government.

Sina Weibo does have a
small English-language section featuring celebrity users like David
Beckham, Tom Cruise and British Prime Minister David Cameron.

E-commerce
behemoth Alibaba Group is more difficult to describe. It has been
described as China's Amazon, eBay and PayPal wrapped into one. But
Alibaba isn't a perfect mirror of any of those U.S. counterparts, and
its scope is much broader.

Alibaba
followed Sina Weibo's news by revealing its own plans on Sunday: a New
York debut that could reportedly raise $15 billion for the company.
While Alibaba hasn't filed its official paperwork yet, its stock-market
debut is slated to be the buzziest since that of Facebook.

The company said in its announcement on
Sunday that the U.S. IPO "will make us a more global company and
enhance the company’s transparency, as well as allow the company to
continue to pursue our long-term vision and ideals."

Alibaba
employs about 20,000 people in more than 70 offices in China,
Singapore, India and the United States. The company's nine major
businesses span all parts of the e-commerce process, and they're split
between consumer- and business-focused missions.

On
the consumer side, Alibaba's crown jewel is Taobao Marketplace: an
eBay-like online shopping site with a whopping 760 million product
listings as of March 2013, the most recent data available. According to
Internet site ranking company Alexa, it's the 8th most popular site in
the world and the No. 3 site in China.

The
more upscale Tmall sells brand-name goods from from 70,000 global
companies including Apple, Nike, Gap and Adidas. ETao is a search engine
exclusively for shopping, which lets users hunt for products, coupons,
hotels and more. Alibaba also runs a Groupon competitor called
Juhuasuan.But
Alibaba was founded for businesses, and that legacy continues. The
namesake Alibaba.com is a trading site that connects small businesses
with two million suppliers. Both 1688.com and AliExpress focus on the
wholesale marketplace. The PayPal-like Alipay is the biggest third-party
online payment platform in China, and Aliyun.com sells cloud computing
and data services to other companies.

Alibaba's
CEO is the charismatic Jack Ma, who created the company in 1999 with 17
co-founders working out of an apartment in Hangzhou, China. Unlike many
of the dot-coms that went bust during that time, Alibaba became
profitable just three years later. That attracted big investors like
Yahoo, which currently owns about a quarter of Alibaba, and Japan's
Softbank, which owns about 37 percent.

Like
Sina Weibo, however, Alibaba also faces competition. The large Chinese
investment firm Tencent announced this month that it will buy a 15
percent in JD.com, the country's No. 2 e-commerce company.

viernes, enero 17, 2014

China, the largest foreign buyer of U.S. Treasury debt, increased its holdings by $12.2 billion in November. This represents almost a 1% increase in its total debt holdings to $1.32 trillion, a record level.

The second largest foreign holder of treasury debt is Japan, which increased its holdings by 1% to $1.19 trillion, also a record. Overall, foreign holdings of U.S. treasury bonds increased by 1.1% in November to 5.72 trillion. Some are unsure about the consequences of China and Japan owning such a large amount of U.S. treasuries. However, this huge investment in America ties both countries' fortunes with the success of the U.S. economy.

According to Forbes contributor Kenneth Rapoza, foreign investors owning debt is not a threat to the United States. Rapoza points out that of the $16 trillion in outstanding U.S. debt, most of it is held by large banks here in America: Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citibank, and Bank of America. China holds about 7.5% of U.S. debt. “One of the reasons why China has so much Treasury holdings is because of trade. Companies put money in short term Treasury notes and bills to settle trade payments,” Rapoza asserts.

Forbes also noted that the Pentagon did an assessment on the risks posed by China’s ownership of U.S. treasuries in July and came to the same conclusion: “Attempting to use U.S. Treasury securities as a coercive tool would have limited effect and likely would do more harm to China than to the United States.”

lunes, enero 13, 2014

China's military last week conducted the first flight test of a new ultra-high speed missile vehicle aimed at delivering warheads through U.S. missile defenses, Pentagon officials said.

The test of the new hypersonic glide vehicle was carried out Jan. 9 and the experimental weapon is being dubbed the WU-14 by the Pentagon, said officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The hypersonic vehicle represents a major step forward in China's secretive strategic nuclear and conventional military and missile programs.

The new hypersonic vehicle was detected traveling at extremely high speeds during the flight test over China, said officials who discussed some details of the test.

The hypersonic craft appears designed to be launched atop one of China's intercontinental ballistic missiles, and then glides and maneuvers at speeds of up to 10 times the speed of sound from near space en route to its target, the officials said.

A Pentagon spokesman confirmed the test but declined to provide details.

viernes, diciembre 13, 2013

A Chinese naval vessel tried to force a U.S. guided missile warship to stop in international waters recently, causing a tense military standoff in the latest case of Chinese maritime harassment, according to defense officials.

The guided missile cruiser USS Cowpens, which recently took part in disaster relief operations in the Philippines, was confronted by Chinese warships in the South China Sea near Beijing’s new aircraft carrier Liaoning, according to officials familiar with the incident.

“On December 5th, while lawfully operating in international waters in the South China Sea, USS Cowpens and a PLA Navy vessel had an encounter that required maneuvering to avoid a collision,” a Navy official said.

“This incident underscores the need to ensure the highest standards of professional seamanship, including communications between vessels, to mitigate the risk of an unintended incident or mishap.”

A State Department official said the U.S. government issued protests to China in both Washington and Beijing in both diplomatic and military channels.

The Cowpens was conducting surveillance of the Liaoning at the time. The carrier had recently sailed from the port of Qingdao on the northern Chinese coast into the South China Sea.

According to the officials, the run-in began after a Chinese navy vessel sent a hailing warning and ordered the Cowpens to stop. The cruiser continued on its course and refused the order because it was operating in international waters.

A group of disputed islands, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, is seen in the East China Sea. Japan and the United States sharply criticized China's move to impose new rules on airspace over islands at the heart of a territorial dispute with Tokyo.

By Jim Miklaszewski and Courtney Kube, NBC News

Two American B-52 bombers flew over a disputed island chain in the East China Sea on Monday evening, a U.S. defense official confirmed, just days after the Chinese government included the area in an air defense identification zone.
The official said the flight was a training mission and the bombers were not armed. The flight was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.
The Chinese announced over the weekend they were expanding their air defense identification zone to include the islands, known as Diaoyu in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese. Japan also claims ownership.
The extension of the air defense identification zone includes an expectation by the Chinese government that all aircraft declare a flight plan and frequency and provide other information before entering.
The U.S. administration denounced the decision and declared that the U.S. will continue to conduct flight operations in and around that area.
"We will not in any way change how we conduct our operations," Pentagon spokesperson Col. Steve Warren said, adding that the U.S. maintains that the newly expanded ADIZ is in international waters.
Monday evening ET, two B-52 bombers took off from Anderson Air Force Base in Guam as part of an ongoing training exercise called Coral Lightning Global Power Training Sortie. The bombers were in the ADIZ for less than one hour, Warren said.
This was a "long-planned training exercise," and the U.S. did not inform the Chinese of their flight plan, Warren said.
The flights occurred without incident, Warren said, adding that there was no reaction, no Chinese aircraft were spotted in the air, and the Chinese did not contact the U.S. military about the flight.
"Nobody is talking about the possibility of armed conflict coming out of this [ADIZ decision]," Warren said.

Denny Cantrell / U.S. Navy for AP

A U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber from Andersen Air Force base in Guam during an training exercise Tuesday.
(AP Photo/U.S. Navy, Denny Cantrell)

viernes, octubre 18, 2013

China’s Dagong credit rating agency on October 17th downgraded its United States sovereign credit rating to A- and maintained its negative outlook on America’s solvency. Dagong warned that despite Washington's last-minute resolution of the debt ceiling deadlock, “The fundamental situation that the debt growth rate significantly outpaces that of fiscal income and gross domestic product remains unchanged.”

China's official state-run news agency, Xinhua, reiterated its statements that because of the continuing risk of a U.S. debt default, it is “a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world.” This language is code for China wanting to abandon the U.S. dollar as the world’s “reserve currency” and move international financial transactions to the renminbi, the currency of the People's Republic of China.

Having benefited for twenty years from their under-valued currency, importing manufacturing jobs, and exporting lower priced products, China’s comparative advantage is being destroyed by America’s oil and natural gas fracking boom. The Chinese communist authorities are terrified their loss of competitiveness will cause unemployment and the social consequences that flow from it. But with the terms of trade now substantially against China, convincing the world to dump the U.S. dollar as reserve currency and switch to the Chinese “renminbi” is their best hope to try to save tens of millions of manufacturing jobs.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, China’s economy began to implode and inflation skyrocketed from 10% to 25%. The United States, Europe, and Japan saved the Chinese economy by allowing China to devalue their currency by 68% and gain tariff free export to the world’s largest markets. Under this new communist form of capitalism from 1993 to 2008, China’s economy quadrupled, the U.S. economy doubled, Europe's rose by half, and Japan's stagnated.

Contract manufacturing is a very competitive business and historically had an average profit margin of only 3.5%. This assumes uncontrollable costs of about 75-80% for purchased inputs and 13.5% for energy. The companies primarily compete over managements’ ability to get more or less productivity from an average of 8.5% in labor cost, but China’s labor rates were initially 75% cheaper than the U.S. By moving production to China, manufacturers could often double their profit margins to 7% of sales. Once in China, manufacturers could also discount their sales prices to wipe out U.S. competition.

U.S. trade “experts” in 1993 expected Chinese workers’ total factor productivity (TFP) would be less than a quarter of American workers’ 1.25% annual productivity gain. This may not sound like allot, but over a 15 year period Chinese manufacturers would produce a unit for 95% of original cost and U.S. manufacturers would be producing the same unit for 82% of cost. The “experts” predicted few jobs would be lost to China, and America would gain new markets for high tech manufactured goods.

Over the next 15 years, China grew the number of assembly workers involved in manufacturing for export to over 200 million workers. America lost about eight million manufacturing jobs to China, 40% of our 20 million production jobs. But even more damaging, every manufacturing job also lost four service jobs and another 1.58 manufacturing jobs from sub-assembly manufacturers who locate near their customer.

China understood that as it sucked manufacturing jobs out of the U.S., the Chinese renminbi currency would be expected to rise in value and destroy their “cheap” labor advantage. As a communist nation, they adopted a national policy of recycling a portion of their export sales revenue into the purchase of U.S. Treasury bonds to drive up the value of the U.S. dollar versus the Chinese renminbi.

martes, julio 23, 2013

Public records show that Chinese company Huawei, a company accused of passing "intimate" information to the Chinese government, employed 18 lobbyists on Capitol Hill in 2012, including former Democratic Congressman Don Bonker of Washington.

Former CIA and NSA director and retired four-star General Michael Hayden told the Australian Financial Review (AFR) that telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies has passed information to the Chinese government.

General Hayden said Western intelligence agencies had information about Huawei’s clandestine activities and it had, at a minimum, “shared with the Chinese state intimate and extensive knowledge of the foreign telecommunications systems it is involved with,” he said. “I think that goes without saying – it’s one reality,” he said.

According to lobbying records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, Huawei is heavily influential on Capitol Hill. In 2012 alone, Huawei spent $1,677,500 on lobbying spread over six outside firms and its own internal lobbying shop, with a total of 18 lobbyists representing it.

Issues the company paid the lobbyists to represent it on include telecommunications and broadcasting, as well as trade policy.

Bonker, the ex-congressman from Washington, served as a Democrat in the U.S. House from 1975 until 1989.

For its part, Huawei denies Hayden's accusations, saying he does not have evidence to support them.

“It’s time to put up or shut up,” Huawei’s global cyber security officer and former U.K. government chief information officer, John Suffolk, said.

But AFR reports that “General Hayden said that given the ‘over-arching national security risks a foreign company building your national telecoms networks creates, the burden of proof is on Huawei.’”

Huawei has fallen “well short” of meeting the test, he [Hayden] said.

“These guys are not even transparent to themselves,” he said. “There’s no transparency around who appoints the board or who controls the ownership of the business."

"And there’s no independent Chinese government oversight committee that could give us confidence that Huawei would not do what they promised not to do.”

viernes, junio 28, 2013

No one seems to be asking where all these new provisional status Americans will work if Immigration Reform of any type becomes law now or in the future. Of course, amnestied aliens will continue to take jobs away from Americans, but jobs doing what? No one can raise a family on a low skill low wage job and prosper in America. Or can they?

Back in April, Secretary of State John Kerry met with Chinese government representatives to promote China’s investment in US Infrastructure Projects. At the same time, Obama regurgitated his idea of an “Infrastructure Bank.” I penned a piece about both, but got lost in the “Chinese government in America” thing and never made the connection to Immigration Reform. However, I think there is a very real connection between the calls for rebuilding the US Infrastructure, Obama’s investment overtures to China and our federal legislatures rush to legalize tens of millions of low cost illegal immigrant laborers.

The American economy is at a standstill. Manufacturing jobs that have been shipped offshore are not coming back to an over-regulated and over-taxed Obama economy. The Construction trades have been devastated by the recession. Bottom line is there are more workers than jobs. The Construction Industry cannot afford to keep people on the payroll or hire out of union halls unless there are projects that need building.

To illustrate my point, I offer Texas, one of the largest economies in the world. Yet a high percentage of its construction labor is now employed in the petrochemical industry, not the construction trades. Even as strong as the Texas economy is, there is not enough building trades work to go around. Even for the companies that employ cheap illegal immigrant labor.

With almost $17 trillion dollars, in short term national debt and estimated long term unfunded liabilities for our entitlement programs somewhere north of $150 trillion, the US government and taxpayer cannot afford to borrow much money for very long to finance rebuilding America’s Infrastructure. Not under our Obama economic models. Our government, Democrats and Republicans, all recognize that Americans may be feeding off their treasury, but America cannot be dependent on the rest of the world.

The White House and our lawmakers are strangely mute about the future of American Infrastructure Projects. Oh, they bristle and politic when a bridge collapses and they ribbon-cut often as it offers a photo op, but they are sketchy on details for why we are holding back on putting Americans to work on sorely needed public works and energy generation projects. Why?

For decades, American companies have manipulated our politicians and immigration laws to secure tax benefits for employing legal immigrant labor from around the world. Labor that was brought here in an expedient fashion, fast tracked if you will through the immigration process, sold as big hearted America’s helping hand to asylum seekers, when in reality they were a handpicked workforce designed to get the job done cheap. You pick a country that has had civil strife and I guarantee you that somewhere in the US is a Congressional district swamped with these people performing cheap labor and subsisting off the taxpayer. Not to mention a very happy public official with his or her hands in some campaign contributors pocket and cadre of newly sworn voters ready to head to the polls when instructed.

I believe that our government is executing a plan that is guaranteed to keep them fat and happy while we sweat the load. The Senate has not convinced the Congress, yet, but it is coming whether conservatives like it or not. Either that or our infrastructure and energy production needs will suffer. This is how Washington does business. It is called extortion.

Current Immigration reform includes immediate right to work status for all. For some it provides immediate citizenship and special worker protections required by law to work on public works or government job sites. The current bill also establishes an “Immigrant prevailing wage.” Sounds like government code for base union scale wages, but I could be wrong.

John Kerry went to China to soothe our bankers back in April. The Chinese are not satisfied with the slim pickings in America anymore. They want some real meat and it is going to take amnesty and a boatload of tax breaks, but this is our governments plan.

Every bubble that was re-inflated by Obama since 2008 is getting very thin. They have to do something quick or it is all going to fall apart. Selling out millions of voting Americans who will be replaced by millions of new voters is an ugly theory to swallow. America had better start chewing on it now before they cram it down our throats.

Immigration reform will destroy America. Vigorously protest and stop it now or it is over for all of us.

viernes, junio 14, 2013

A Communist Party-backed newspaper in China is urging that country's leadership to obtain more information from the former CIA employee who leaked information about the U.S. surveillance programs before fleeing to Hong Kong.

The Global Times newspaper said in an editorial Friday that Edward Snowden should not be sent back to the U.S. because his revelations about secret American surveillance programs concern China's national interest.

The newspaper said that the Chinese government should not only consider Beijing's relations with the United States but also domestic public opinion, which the paper says would be unhappy if Snowden were sent back.

The Global Times said in the editorial, which ran in the paper's Chinese- and English-language editions, that Snowden could offer intelligence that would help China update its understanding of cyberspace and improve its position in negotiations with Washington.

"Snowden took the initiative to expose the U.S. government's attacks on Hong Kong and the mainland's Internet networks. This concerns China's national interest," the commentary said. "Maybe he has more evidence. The Chinese government should let him speak out and according to whether the information is public, use it as evidence to negotiate with the United States openly or in private."

The paper said that the Chinese government should not only consider Beijing's relations with the United States but also the opinion of its domestic public, which the paper said would be unhappy if Snowden were sent back.

"We have realized the United States' aggressiveness in cyberspace, we have realized that nine Internet companies have assisted the U.S. government in intelligence outsourcing," said the paper known for a nationalist stance. "We have realized their hypocrisy in saying one thing and doing another, and we have realized their ruthlessness in doing what they please with no regard for other people."

"China is a rising power, and it deserves corresponding respect from the United States," it said.

Snowden alleged in an interview with the South China Morning Post newspaper Thursday that the NSA has been monitoring the Chinese University of Hong Kong and public officials and citizens in the city.

Snowden told the paper he believes there have been more than 61,000 NSA hacking operations globally.

The 29-year-old reportedly also told the newspaper his plans for the immediate future, steps he claims the U.S. has taken since he broke his cover in Hong Kong, fears for his family as well as explosive details on U.S. surveillance targets.

On Thursday, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Hua Chungying said China is a "major victim" of cyberattacks but did not lay blame.

Snowden is behind one of the biggest intelligence leaks in American history. The former Booz Allen Hamilton contractor who worked at the National Security Agency, hopped a flight to Asia on May 20 and has remained on the lam ever since.

The Associated Press reported Friday that the British government issued an alert to airlines around the world, urging them not to allow Snowden to board flights to the United Kingdom.

The alert, dated Monday on a Home Office letterhead, said carriers should deny Snowden boarding because "the individual is highly likely to be refused entry to the UK."

The Associated Press saw a photograph of the document taken Friday at a Thai airport. A British diplomat confirmed that the document was genuine and was sent out to airlines around the world.

In what is likely his final appearance as FBI director before the House Judiciary Committee, Mueller said Thursday that Snowden is the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation.

In his three hours of testimony, Mueller defended the government's collection of millions of U.S. phone records, emails and other information as vital to the nation's national security.

"Every time that we have a leak like this — and if you follow it up and you look at the intelligence afterwards" — the terrorists "are looking at the ways around it," Mueller said.

lunes, junio 10, 2013

The deafening silence following the Xi Jinping / Barack Obama summit

President Xi to meet Obama (Global Times)

Prior to the two-day meeting of China's president Xi Jinping and U.S. president Barack Obama, both of them bubbled with enthusiasm, and talked about a "new model" of cooperation between China and the U.S. Now that's it's over, a U.S. official has described it as "unique, positive and constructive."
But the only agreement to come out of the meeting was North Korea shouldn't have nuclear weapons. That was it. The silence has been deafening. Let's see if we can guess what happened with respect to the other issues that were supposed to be discussed at this summit:

Cyberwar: U.S. National Security Advisor Tom Donilon said Obama had warned Xi that cyber-crime could be an "inhibitor" in US-China relations, which is really a laughable statement. My guess is that Xi told the following to Obama: "We're going to continue what we're doing, and anyway, you're doing the same thing."

South China Sea: Obama would have told Xi that disputes should be decided by negotiation, or mediated by the United Nations. Xi would have told Obama: "Everything in the South China Sea is indisputably the sovereign territory of China, no matter what the U.N. says, and we will do everything we have to do militarily to preserve our sovereign properties." Xi would also have warned Obama to stop meddling in the region and causing problems.

Human rights: Obama might have raised concerns about Chinese treatment of dissidents, Tibetans and Uighurs. Xi would have said: "These are all internal matters to China, and the United States has no business interfering in them."

Syria: "These are all internal matters to Syria, and the United States has no business interfering in them."

It's well to remember, as I've described in the past, that Xi Jinping has launched a series of "The China Dream" speeches, in which he calls for China to shed its past as a secondary player, and become the world's top military and economic power. He's visited Chinese military bases and told the troops to be ready for war at any time. He's personally taking charge of policy in the East and South China Seas, and has vowed that China will take every step necessary to gain control of these regions, including areas that have been owned by other countries for centuries. China is rapidly preparing for war with India, Vietnam, Philippines, Japan and the U.S., and Xi Jinping is committed to leading the effort. When President Obama was asked how the meeting was going, he said "Terrific!" The credulous mainstream press thought he was saying that the meeting was going well, but I interpreted his response as being sarcastic. It's possible that President Obama may now realize that his smooth rhetoric will have no effect on anything that China is going to do. BBC and Global Times (Beijing)

George W. Obama

George W. Obama (Huffington Post)

A number of President Barack Obama's supporters on the left are claiming that Obama has morphed into President George W. Bush. The adjoining picture is a blending of the images of Obama and Bush and looks really weird. Nonetheless, this photo was displayed last week on the front page of the left-wing Huffington Post to demonstrate their distress that sometimes Obama isn't the total loony nutcase that the far left wants him to be.
Apparently it wasn't Benghazi scandal or the IRS scandal or the threats target Fox News's James Rosen or the lies and stonewalling and coverups that caused this comparison to be made. That's just as well, because for those, we should have a picture of Richard M. Obama.
Ironically, the revelation that's causing the left to complain about George W. Obama is the revelation about Prism, the secret government programs that collect phone and internet data to help thwart terrorists. That's ironic, because from what I understand the technical details of the operation of Prism to be, and unlike the IRS targeting of Obama's enemies, the American public appears to be protected, and the program provides a powerful and valuable service in protecting America from terrorist attacks. Regarding Prism, the real crime is that it was made public by another left-wing nutcase.
Long-time readers of my web site will not be surprised at all that Obama's terms as president are very much like Bush's third and fourth terms would have been. As I've said many times, I didn't worry too much about the ridiculous claims that Obama said during the 2008 campaign, because I knew it was just fatuous campaign rhetoric. But he didn't abandon those claims after he was elected, and I remember thinking, "Ohmigod, he actually believes all the crap."
But Obama has gotten some painful lessons since then. He would cure global warming, close Guantanamo, become friendly with Iran and North Korea, bring a two-state solution to Palestinians and Israelis, beat the Taliban and al-Qaeda, end the financial crisis, reflate the real estate and stock market bubbles and, of course, provide universal health care. All of these objectives have been total failures, the sole exception being his health care program, which is going to be an economic disaster if it's not heavily modified.
As I've written dozens of times since 2008, it's a basic principle of Generational Dynamics that even in a dictatorship, major policies and events are determined by masses of people, entire generations of people, and not by politicians. What politicians say or do is irrelevant, except insofar as their actions reflect the attitudes of the people that they represent, and so politicians can neither cause nor prevent the great events of history. It's a consequence of that basic principle that whatever was going to happen in the Obama administration is the same thing that would have happened in additional Bush administrations, because it was the result of generational forces.
There's another generational connection to be made in this picture. Why should anyone be surprised that the IRS is full of people who are using the power of the IRS to target political enemies? It's just a few years ago that an entire generation -- Generation-X -- of financial engineers in the banking system created tens of trillions of dollars of fraudulent subprime mortgage-backed securities and sold them as AAA-rated. Then you have the widespread Libor fixing crimes, then energy-fixing crimes, various crimes in the computer industry that I've seen with my own eyes. And you have experts on CNBC every day lie about stock valuations. (As an aside, the S&P 500 Price/Earnings ratio, as reported by Friday's Wall Street Journal is an astronomically high value of 18.38, meaning that stocks are far overpriced.)
So if thousands of financial institutions caused the financial crisis by creating tens of trillions of dollars in fraudulent securities, then of course the IRS is going to perform its own very of fraud and extortion. The same is going to be true at other government agencies. Why would anyone believe anything else?
And what about the bank presidents. Did they know what was going on? How stupid would they have to be not to know that their bank was making millions of dollars selling trillions of dollars in fraudulent securities? Of course they knew what was going on, and of course they've been lying about it.
And what about President Obama. Did he know what was going on at the IRS? How stupid would he have to be not to know that the IRS was targeting his political opponents in the middle of his reelection campaign? Of course he knew what was going on, and of course he's been lying about it.
President Obama's repeated failures have been tremendous learning experiences for him. And this weekend, he's had another learning experience -- his "terrific" meeting with China's president Xi Jinping must surely have opened his eyes to the fact that things are not going to go in the direction he was hoping even a month ago. Bloomberg

"You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother" - Albert Einstein

"It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office" - H. L. Menken

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented" -Elie Wiesel

"Stay hungry, stay foolish" - Steve Jobs

"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert , in five years ther'ed be a shortage of sand" - Milton Friedman

"The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less" - Vaclav Havel